


Silk and Fire, Steel and Ice

by m3aculpa



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: M/M, Mild Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-21
Updated: 2010-08-21
Packaged: 2017-10-24 15:31:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m3aculpa/pseuds/m3aculpa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Methos would never let Mac know everything that Kronos was to him. Brother, he could allow him to know. But everything else - he'd keep close to his chest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Silk and Fire, Steel and Ice

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** Silk and Fire, Steel and Ice  
>  **Fandom:** Highlander: The Series **  
> Rating:** PG  
>  **Characters/Pairings:** Methos, implied Methos/Kronos  
>  **Warnings:** Language, spoilers for 5x12 "Comes a Horseman" and 5x13 "Revelation 6:8"  
>  **Word count:** 1865  
>  **Summary** : Methos would never let Mac know everything that Kronos was to him. Brother, he could allow him to know. But everything else - he'd keep close to his chest.

Kronos is… was… like a psychotic puppy. It wants you to pet it, but at the same time it wants nothing more than take a bite out of your hand. Kronos could embrace somebody, only to stab a dagger through said person’s heart.  
   
Methos should know. He’d been on the receiving end of that habit more than once. Luckily death was not permanent in his case.  
   
He takes another swig directly from the bottle. The whiskey burns his throat. No beer tonight. Only a whiskey that burns and is so strong he can barely taste it. It’s cheap and MacLeod would be appalled. He is appalled by his choice on a level that is not succumbing to the twisting of the shared quickenings. The whiskey is not strong enough to match the burn in his head, his heart, his stomach. It feels like he is being burnt on the stake once again and _that_ was not a pleasant way to die.  
   
He once said he had not felt guilt since the eleventh century… if that is true, then he sure enough is feeling enough of it to make up for it. He liked Silas. Gentle giant who loved his animals and never understood the consequences of bloodshed enough to realize it should not be a recreational pastime. The others, they had known. They had known it was wrong, but not cared because they were gods on earth.  
   
Oh, and Kronos… Kronos is – was, dammit, was! – his brother. Not in a platonic sense all the time. The things they had done would appal MacLeod. Upset his delicate senses. Methos snorts and takes another swig of alcohol. Oh, MacLeod doesn’t know half of it. And if Methos gets his way he will never know.  
   
Kronos is – was! – silk and fire. He was steel and ice. Kronos was bulkier and stronger and, damn, if that hadn’t caused a thrill to go through his body whenever he was reminded of the fact. There were few things they had not done and few things that Methos had not enjoyed. There were some things he had not enjoyed. Sometimes it had not been consensual. But by the far majority he had been a willing participant in Kronos games, both in bed and on the battlefield.  
   
Kronos was his brother. The man walked too dangerously on the knife edge of madness and all too aware of it. He was lucid one minute and raving in the next. He was just as brilliant as he was dangerous and for a time he had been Methos’s. Just as Methos had been his. Before Methos realized that they were not gods. Simply immortals. Freaks of nature.  
   
He fled. He abandoned Kronos and the others. He never expected to see them again. But Kronos had come for him, just like he always had said he would. Because there was a bond that MacLeod impossibly could ever understand. Hadn’t he said that if he judged Kronos worthy to die, he would have judged himself equally? They were the opposite sides of a coin. Ying and yang. But there is a half missing now. Methos doesn’t need Kronos half any longer. But he will miss it.  
   
He will bury the memories again tomorrow. But tonight he will have nightmares, or rather dream about memories, and wake up tossing and turning. He will remember the edge in Kronos’s eyes, the fine line between sanity and insanity. He will remember silk and fire, steel and ice, and it’s possible he will cry.  
   
MacLeod would never understand… but they were his _brothers_. The times were different and the whole bloody world was different! They thought that they were _gods_. MacLeod can not hold that against them, but he does. Methos can accept him judging Kronos and Caspian, even Silas, for bringing that into the modern world. However, he cannot accept MacLeod’s judgement over times he had not lived through. Bloody Scot.  
   
If he wants some wisdom, from the now disgraced ancient in MacLeod’s eyes, here it is: everything dies. Civilisations rise and fall, people are born and they die, and this entire time Methos watches on from the sidelines. He survives when everything collapses.  
   
There are boxes of memories stashed into the subconscious of his mind. He will add his brothers to those boxes soon. Maybe he will even pick up and leave; start all over somewhere else. Somewhere else where he won’t have to look at MacLeod and feel impotent anger. Somewhere he can drop Adam Pierson and become somebody else.  
   
Maybe.  
   
The only certain thing is that tonight he will drink himself into oblivion and then he will dream of a mad laugh and a suffocating embrace. Memories of fire and silk, ice and steel, that he will lock away when he can.  
   
The whiskey burns.  
   
Just… just let him keep his memories for tonight.  



End file.
